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http://www.diditforthelulz.com/

TeamSpeak: ts.diditforthelulz.com:8767

It appears that the name servers have been changed. A quick whois reveals this:

Name Server:NS1.DIDITFORTHELULZ.COM
Name Server:NS2.DIDITFORTHELULZ.COM
Name Server:NS3.DIDITFORTHELULZ.COM

Somehow the people who did this got a hold of the domain name registrar account. The 4chan status blog recommends not visiting until the all clear is given. Perhaps now I can spend more time doing productive things, at least until the situation is resolved (ugh bad pun). Of course if it weren’t for my dodgy ISP I could just change my hosts file and be done with it.

[latest news on the situation can be found at the 4chan status blog: link]

update: stuff has become even more orz since this morning now there’s a forum in place instead.

A homicide survivors group has called to ban Naruto action figures from sale in Australia because of their violent undertones and perfectly sculpted weaponry. Check out the awkward looking photo of the toys in the article. It looks like Naruto hasn’t been eating right and Sasuke hasn’t held a weapon of any kind before. PFT!

Here’s a link to the scan of the article from the newspaper. (Thanks Khardic)
Here’s a link to the article on news.com.au (Thanks Hi_Nu).

I was sifting through my stack of DVDs the other day and found a short article about Animania 2004 from the Movie show on SBS that aired in January 2005. So I thought I’d imortalise it on Youtube. Much like any video article from the past there is a certain element of wtf and a bit of fanboy/girling going on. It does do a pretty decent job of describing what an anime convention and cosplay is. Some of the people they interviewed had some interesting ideas about how to describe their fandom, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re put on the spot. One of the more interesting parts is when the interviewer asks Ben Clay (of Madman) indirectly about fansubs or what Mike C had to say about why anime fandom is beginning to really take off in Australia.It’s kind of strange looking back at this and seeing a lot of people I recognise. I guess this goes to show how close knit the Sydney anime community was back then.

The SOS Brigade Australia Division launched their site last month (at least according to the news update, the hit counter tells another story). No viral marketing on the scale of the U.S. license, (the cat was out of the bag ages ago) but there was a small nod to that on Madman’s anime news page. The news item found here reads:

“The invasion is coming…
The world will never be the same again…September 12, 2007 – H“

Certainly not as hyper as Haruhi would normally be… all those dots are so mysterious!

This must have been posted in the last two weeks based on the news items before, the one about cyber-crime couldn’t have been posted before the 6th of July when the statements were made by Australian Federal Police.

The site features the obligatory SOS-dan emblem and a hit counter, web-bling (check the screen cap above), a streaming video with the full version of the Hare Hare Yukai dance from the ending sequence and a pre-announcement of a national Hare Hare Yukai dance off of “epic proportions”.

I’m looking forward to this competition with something halfway between sicky feelings and awe.

For the uninformed, Fan Dub is a quasi-improvisation re-dub of a short anime clip, where competitors do their best to come up with the funniest audio track possible that still holds some kind of a plot. Each group (or individual) is given 20 minutes to prepare the script and make a final cut.

In previous years I’ve run fan dub at Animania (’05 and ’06) there’s always been a problem of trying to fit in two days worth of recording times and still have all the videos synced up, judged and ready to screen in the period of a few hours. When there’s only 15 videos it’s not hard, but as the competition grows in popularity time to do everything grows rather short. It’s always been a lot of fun in the recording booth watching people bounce the most bizzare ideas around. Some memorable examples include; changing Prime and Megatron’s final fight into Romeo and Juliet’s declaration of their love, or revealing that Vash the Stampede is really Billy Idol and Wolfwood is his biggest fan. OK, so maybe you actually have to see the clips to get what I’m on about. If I ever get my copies of the videos back I might try get them up somewhere for people to see.

So what’s different this year about fan dub? Instead of making all the recordings on the days of the festival all entries will be sent in ahead of time (kind of like the AMV competition). Which might just sound like I’m being a bit lazy but there’s two really cool advantages to this that I think is really going to make 2007’s fan dub awesome:

Contestants are able to choose what they use for source material; in the last two years I’ve provided about 10-15 short clips for people to pick between. This year there’s only a few small restrictions on what can be used.

There’s a lot more than 20 minutes to watch the clip, plan and record an entry; now timing, scripts and lip-syncing can be perfected. Sure, there’s bound to be a loss in spontaneity being able to really think stuff out is going to make for a better competition overall.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this years fan dub will turn out. I hope that everyone involved contestants and audience members are going to enjoy it as much as I will.

For more information about this years Fan Dub competition check out the Fan Dub page on the Animania Festival website. It contains all the details one would need to get started.

For those of you in Australia who don’t already know, Ergo Proxy will begin airing on ABC2 tonight at 9pm, picking up Cowboy Bebop’s time slot. Big thumbs up to the ABC for picking Ergo Proxy, it’s not the kind of show that would typically make it to TV in Australia (then again this is the ABC we’re talking about). Let’s hope that they continue picking up awesome series like this.

If you’re not around tonight to catch it there’s several repeats of the first episode during the next three weeks. Airing times can be found on ABC2’s Ergo Proxy page.

A minor note about the blog; Since October last year I’ve been really way too busy to get any coherent thoughts out about anything anime related. Now that my major project at uni is over and I’ll have a bit more time on my hands hopefully I’ll be able to get an update out once a week. I want the content of my posts to shy away from episode reviews, there’s plenty of decent blogs that already do that. So I’m going to try something else, what that is I don’t really know but we’ll see what happens!

Remember that terrible sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways? The group responsible for it Aum Shinrikyo have turned their efforts towards more positive outlets. They’ve funded the creation of this short film about their leader. It’s incredibly happy for a man who’s been pulled up on 27 murder counts and now awaiting execution. Truth be told I couldn’t watch this 7 minute clip for more than a minute at a time, and even after watching all of it I’m not sure what convinced these people to make the clip.
There is no dialogue at all but there is a lot of singing, the use of Shoko Asahara’s name, phasing through walls, mind melding and purple pajamas.
Link: Wired’s Table of Malcontents Blog

For those of you who frequent Anime on DVD you might have noticed for the last few days every “s” and “o” on the front page links to this site http://asosbrigade.com which states that on the 22nd of December “The World As You Know It Is About to End”. The Anime on DVD admin’s forum avatar has also changed to be Haruhi themed too and hasn’t let out much more than a ” I am the master of subtlety”. Pretty odd huh?

At first I thought it was a license announcement. Upon a quick whois it is revealed that the domain was only registered on the 15th, but there was nothing there until the 18th (so says the internet). The 18th of December is a significant date in the fourth Haruhi novel “The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi”, apparently it’s the date that Haruhi goes missing (I haven’t read that far yet so I’m not exactly sure how correct that is). Also it’s registered through a domain proxy keeping the identity of the registrant secret, something rather unlikely for a business to do.

At the bottom of the page is a Japanese copyright notice. That doesn’t match up with what’s written in the title bar, why would the North America Haruhi site have a foreign language copyright notice? It also is claimed to be an English language site in this article on ANN. Another interesting thing is the hit counter at the top of the page, something that Haruhi was obsessed with on the SOS-dan website in the anime.

The graphic is named h1-121806.gif, this could be related to the date the site became active on 18/12/2006. In the source for the page there is a comment that’s in Japanese (EUC-JP encoding) : 禁則事項は１２月２２日に公表します。

(Classified information will be made public on December 22. – thanks google!)

Classified information sounds like something Mikuru would say don’t you think?
So someone who wishes to remain anonymous paid for Anime on DVD and ANN to put up ads for this site that doesn’t even seem that official?
But wait! There’s more!

There’s a false 404 error on haruhi.tv with an interesting graphic in the top left. After a little bit of manipulation in photoshop we have this:

Spooky! Just like ASOSBrigade site there’s a comment at the bottom in the source:

プログラム起動条件・鍵をそろえよ。最終期限・二日後 (Program starting requirement: Complete the key. Deadline in two days.)
Which was updated today to this:

プログラム起動条件・鍵をそろえよ。最終期限・明日 (Program starting requirement: Complete the key. Deadline is tomorrow.)
Another link to the 4th novel maybe?
So what’s this classified information? I guess we won’t know for another couple of days. Until then it could be anything, a US DVD announcement, 2nd season of the show (like we haven’t heard either of those before), or something else entirely.
Personally I’m hoping that this goes all x-files. Maybe then we can all become ultra detectives!

I’ll keep watching asosbrigade.com and haruhi.tv. If I notice anything else I’ll be sure to post.

Please note that any translation was done through various web tools so stuff I say might be wrong or a little inaccurate.

Until next time!~

Update: I’ve sent off an email to the proxy email address listed in asosbrigade.com’s whois info. I’ll post it up if I get a reply.